Trespasser (13 page)

Outside, the air smelled of snow. The sky had a pewter cast, which erased the shadows from under the trees, and the mud had grown tacky with the falling temperature. I noticed that the reverend’s personal vehicle was a lemon yellow Volkswagen Bug. It glowed from the end of my driveway like a miniature sun.

Davies raised a quizzical eyebrow. “What’s the matter?”

“My patrol truck is still at the jail. The technicians were going to vacuum it for fibers.” One happy consequence of the situation dawned on me. “It looks like we’ll have to do that ride-along some other day.”

The reverend removed an iPhone from her pocket. “Why don’t you call the jail? Maybe the tech people are done with your truck. I can give you a lift over there.”

The next thing I knew, Davies had connected me with the sheriff’s secretary, who informed me that, yes, the state police were done collecting fibers and I could now retrieve my truck from the jail garage. I looked at the chaplain’s Volkswagen, imagining the sad picture of me riding in the passenger seat of that ludicrous vehicle. Her vanity license plate read
REVDD.

“Don’t be such a sissy,” Davies said, once again exhibiting her uncanny ability to read my mind. “Hop in.”

I obeyed.

Fastening my seat belt, I had a premonition of the reverend using the circumstance as a trap to investigate the inner corners of my emotional state. My intuition proved correct.

“Michael,” she began. “I deal with lots of people in pain. That’s my area of expertise. You know the one thing that never works? Bottling up your emotions.”

I squared around. “Look, Reverend. I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but you’re not going to get anywhere with me. I’m kind of an atheist.”

“‘Kind of an atheist’?” She gave me a dazzling flash of teeth. “That’s like being kind of pregnant. Are you an agnostic?”

“I don’t believe in God,” I said flatly.

She seemed to ignore this comment. “Remember what I was telling you about my sermon on Dante. In the
Inferno,
he condemns suicides to the seventh circle of Hell. In the poem, he transforms people who have killed themselves into thorny trees that bleed when a branch is broken off. It’s a horrible image of souls condemned to suffer forever, unable to move or defend themselves from torment because of the offenses they’ve committed against their own bodies.”

“Why exactly are you telling me this?”

“Even an atheist has to admit it’s a powerful metaphor. I think you feel responsible for more than you let on, Michael. Your father especially. No one should carry that amount of guilt.”

I cracked the window so the wind would drown her out. “Who says I feel guilty?”

Davies reassessed her approach. We drove along for five minutes through a brown-and-gray wasteland. Some flakes of light snow began to fall, salting the windshield. She flicked on the wipers, but the crystals blew off on their own.

Finally, she spoke again: “Monhegan Island is part of your district, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Located ten miles off the Maine coast, Monhegan is the glacier-scraped top of a submerged mountain; nothing but sheer cliffs and twisted spruces soaked in perpetual fog, alone in a howling ocean. In 1614, Captain John Smith claimed the island for the English Crown. Today, Monhegan is home to fifty or so year-round residents who make their livings lobstering through the bitter winter months and then catering to tourists all summer.

The reverend continued: “I don’t suppose you go out there much?”

“There’s no real reason to. There’s nothing to hunt except sea ducks and a few pheasants. I leave it to the Marine Patrol.”

“Something you said made me think of a story,” Davies explained. “You weren’t around for this, but in 1997, the islanders hired a sharpshooter to kill every deer on that island.”

“I know this story.”

Back in the 1950s, the locals had arranged to ship some white-tailed deer to Monhegan, the idea being to provide meat and sport to the local populace. At the time, the island’s only resident wild mammal was the Norway rat.

For many years, the deer were considered local attractions. They foraged in the village and nibbled apples from the hands of small children. But over time, the pets became pests. Islanders were forced to fence their vegetable gardens with barriers at least six feet tall. Entire species of wildflowers were eaten to extinction. And in-breeding among the deer began to produce deformed antlers and stunted growth: real freak-show specimens. The last straw was when the deer and the rats began passing ticks back and forth. The ticks carried Lyme disease, and by the 1990s an epidemic of the illness plagued the island.

“What you don’t know,” said Deb Davies, “is that I was the island chaplain—every year there’s a different volunteer who gets to spend the summer out there—when the town debated the issue of what to do about the deer.”

“That must have been pleasant.”

“The island was totally divided over the issue. On the one hand, you had people concerned about the public health risk and the general nuisance factor. On the other hand, you had people who couldn’t imagine Monhegan without its deer. The town meetings were so contentious. But in the end, the discussion kept coming back to all the people who’d gotten Lyme disease. Still, it was a close vote, and I’m not sure folks out there have entirely forgiven one another for what was said. There was some talk at first of just capturing the deer and transporting them to the mainland, but they were dealing with more than a hundred animals, and the cost was just astronomical. So the islanders asked the state to find a sharpshooter.”

“I know the man they hired,” I said. “He’s a biologist from Connecticut who specializes in controlling nuisance animals—‘the world’s best deer killer.’”

“That’s what he calls himself.” Davies smiled at me. “The sharpshooter set up feeding stations around the island to get the deer used to gathering in the same places. A month later, he returned with a couple of assistants and an ATV to haul out the carcasses. The men worked after dark, using silencers. I was told that if you stayed away from the shed on Lighthouse Hill where they butchered the animals, you would never have known what was happening.”

I had the sense that the reverend was drawing near to the moral of her sermon, so I let her finish.

“It took three years to kill them all,” she said. “They shot seventy-two that first winter, thirty-five the second, and six the third. I wasn’t on the island when the last deer was killed, but I heard about it from a lobsterman friend. After a fresh snow in March, the sharpshooter and his team returned to Monhegan. They scouted Cathedral Woods and located the tracks of a doe and two fawns. And then they killed them. Today, there are no more deer on Monhegan.”

We crossed the border between Thomaston and Rockland. The reverend put on her blinker.

“My friend the lobsterman, he’d grown up living with deer. Every year, between the Harvest Moon Ball and Trap Day, he would go hunting for them. He was a hunter, but no one loved those deer more. On his mantel, he had a photograph of a little doe that had wandered into his living room and settled down on his couch. He loved those deer, but in the end he voted to exterminate them, because he didn’t want his family getting Lyme disease.”

The Volkswagen turned into the jail parking lot.

“I remember my friend calling me the week those last deer were shot,” she said. “It was unusual for him to call, because he’s never been much of a talker. Lobstermen are like game wardens that way.” She piloted the car into a parking space outside the main entrance and brought us to an abrupt halt. “After he told me what had happened, I asked him if he felt guilty, and do you know what he said?”

I knew the response she was calling for. “He said, ‘Why should I feel guilty?’”

The reverend gave me a sly smile and turned the ignition off.

15

There was a television and digital video player set up in the training room, waiting for me. At the reception window, I’d managed to shake loose the Reverend Davies with a promise to continue our conversation later, only to be shepherded quickly by the receptionist into the cluttered, brightly lighted room. I sat alone at the table for a while, examining the ringed Olympics pattern made by a series of coffee cups. Finally, Detective Menario and Assistant Attorney General Danica Marshall came in. The detective, baggy-eyed, unshaven, had on the same wrinkled shirt and trousers from the night before.

I’d glimpsed Danica Marshall in the Knox County Courthouse on a few occasions when I was giving testimony at trials, but we’d never been formally introduced. Her office was located in Augusta, the state capital, but as one of several prosecutors assigned to murder investigations in Maine, she got around a lot, leaving a trail of lewd comments and dirty jokes in her wake. This was my first look at her up close.

My impression had always been that Danica Marshall was a stunner, but there was something severe about her deep-set eyes and cheekbones under the fluorescent lights of the training room. She was petite: five four tops, with a lean body that suggested lots of hours on the elliptical machine. She wore heavy blue eyeliner, an open-throated blouse, heels, and a raven black suit, which matched her hair. I guessed her to be in her late thirties, ten years older than me at least. Her hair was mussed in a way that made you think she’d just climbed out of bed. Maybe it was the hairstyle that explained her reputation as a courthouse sex symbol.

“Let’s start with your statement,” said Danica. (All the deputies and wardens called her by her first name behind her back, and I couldn’t stop myself from doing the same in my head.) “We’d like you to explain in your own words how you discovered Ashley Kim’s car and the steps you took that resulted in you and Warden Stevens breaking into the Westergaard house.”

They’d positioned themselves on either side of me, so I was forced to keep swiveling my head back and forth to converse with both of them. It was going to be like watching a tennis match. “Have you actually read my statement?”

“We read it,” said Menario. His voice was gruff from lack of sleep.

“I tried to offer a detailed explanation for all of my actions.”

“Just walk us through it, will you, Warden?” Danica gave me a polite smile, but her beryl blue eyes were as distant as a woman’s eyes could possibly be.

I started from the beginning: the 911 call, the missing deer, Stump Murphy and Curt Hutchins, the DNA samples I’d taken, my discovery of the Driskos’ presence at the scene of the accident, the information MaryBeth Fickett had provided me about the Westergaards also being from Cambridge, and finally the rush out to Parker Point. I held nothing back.

They let me ramble with minimal interruptions until this point.

“Let’s return to Trooper Hutchins,” said Danica. “You said he arrived at the accident scene approximately fifteen minutes after you.”

“I wasn’t looking at my watch, but that sounds about right.”

“Did he tell you why he was delayed?”

“Something about bad spark plugs.”

“Did you believe him?”

The question took me by surprise. So did my answer. “No.”

“Why not?” asked Menario.

I craned my neck around to meet his gaze. “It just seemed like an odd excuse.”

Why were they asking me about Hutchins? Was there an inconsistency in his statement? Maybe they were already laying the groundwork for an internal affairs investigation.

The muscular detective radiated heat like a pizza oven. “Hutchins says you were in a real hurry to get out of there.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. He told me it was a state police matter and that I should go home.”

“But you didn’t stick around to help him look for the girl.”

“I’d already done so before he arrived. It’s in my statement.”

“You walked up and down the road.” His tone suggested he considered my actions inadequate.

“How would you describe your relationship with Trooper Hutchins?” Danica’s eyes had grown opaque.

“We don’t have a relationship. I’ve only met him a few times.”

Menario gave me a blast of stale coffee breath. “You don’t like him, do you?”

“I have no opinion of him,” I replied, lying.

“Did you or did you not have an altercation with Trooper Hutchins last night?” asked Danica.

“I wouldn’t call it that. We were outside the Westergaard house, waiting for backup. I was angry, and he sort of pushed me.”

“Why were you angry?”

“He’d told me at the accident scene that he would assume responsibility for finding Ashley. He didn’t do squat. As a result, she ended up raped and murdered.”

“So you blame him?”

“Yes, I blame him—and myself.” I made an impatient gesture with my hands and looked squarely at the prosecutor. “I should never have gone home that night. I knew something was wrong.”

The detective and the prosecutor regarded each other over my head. My T-shirt was damp under the arms and down the back, from where I’d been leaning against the chair.

“Will you excuse us for a moment?” asked Danica.

With that, the two of them left the room. I rubbed my mouth and chin. Why had I confessed to feeling guilty over my conduct on the night of Ashley Kim’s disappearance? Was I intent on making myself a scapegoat, too? It must have been that stupid sermon Deb Davies gave me.

After several long moments, the door swung open and the detective and prosecutor returned. They brought with them a gray-eyed, gray-haired, gray-faced man who introduced himself as Detective Atwood of the Knox County sheriff’s department. He then parked himself in a corner and never spoke another word during the remainder of my time in that room.

“We’re going to play a video,” Danica said pleasantly.

“We want you to show us where you trashed the crime scene,” explained Menario.

This time, I didn’t rise to the bait.

*   *   *

Menario tried to run the video machine but quickly became exasperated by its unwillingness to bend to his command. A deputy was brought in to steer us through the house.

We started outside the building and moved carefully up the walkway, just as Charley and I had done the night before. At the front door, I indicated the place where my footprints left the steps and forged off through mud and snow around the corner of the house. Detective Menario scribbled furiously into a notebook as I narrated. The video tech had spent a lot of time photographing the broken window where I’d busted in—the broken glass shining from the carpet, and a few specks of what must have been blood from my arm. Each spot had been numbered and marked by an arrow, with a ruler beside it for scale. We lingered awhile in the kitchen, zooming in on the knife block with its missing blade, before proceeding upstairs. I couldn’t help but think of a cheap horror movie, the shaky camera stalking the hall as if from the killer’s point of view.